Welcome to Episode 7 of the Dr. Mike Show. I am solo on this episode outlining your holiday survival guide for Thanksgiving. I outline how to structure your Thanksgiving day for maximum enjoyment and minimum damage to your weight loss progress.

In This Episode You’ll Learn

What food to eat first, second, and third to best control your blood sugar levels.

When to exercise to help shuttle nutrients from Thanksgiving preferentially to your muscles.

A make or break mindset shift for the holidays and your health.

and more…

The Dr. Mike Show is Brought to You by Neuro Coffee

Neuro Coffee is a high octane brain supplement infused into great coffee.

It contains a patented extract from the coffee fruit, which has been clinically shown to increase levels of brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) after taking. BDNF acts to grow and repair neurons in the brain and the body. As we age, BDNF decreases. Age related diseases of the brain (e.g. age related memory loss) are often associated with low levels of BDNF. Aging in general, stress, and lack of sleep also negatively impact BDNF.

Coffee drinkers never miss their morning cup of coffee, and now with Neuro Coffee you can enjoy that morning ritual even more knowing that it is helping your brain health. Neuro Coffee is roasted in small batches. Click here to start getting your monthly supply of Neuro Coffee. Dr. Mike Show listeners can use the coupon code DRMIKE10 to save 10% on their first order.

Last night was a rare treat as I was able to have dinner with a long-time friend who was in town for business.

(Rochester, NY isn’t really a business hub that people frequent.)

As you can imagine, our conversation eventually landed on nutrition.

We started talking about my friend’s diet,and there were two distinct topics we discussed.

1. My friend is in the middle of a big transition.

When talking about how to get his diet back on track. He said he’d tried counting calories, going Paleo, and working out with a trainer but nothing had given him the results he was looking for. In the end he said, “This week is a little crazy, but after that I’ll be able to focus on my diet.”

This week isn’t crazy…this week is LIFE. I have seen this approach with countless clients over the years. They view their current situation as something special and wait for life to return to normal so that they can place more of an effort on their nutrition. Life is life. Life is never normal. There is no regular schedule. To be successful with your diet and health in the long term, you need to thrive during the crazy weeks. You can’t just throw in the towel and start again on Monday.

Action Step: Look at your current week.What are some changes you can make this week? Can you add more servings of fruits or veggies? Can you eat lean protein at every meal?” You don’t need to be perfect, but think about how you can set yourself up for success and make the best choice in whatever situations you will find yourself in. Don’t just throw in the towel and order a double fettuccine alfredo with garlic bread. (Hint: Go for the chicken picatta—hold the pasta, extra vegetables on the side—instead.)

2. He knows enough about nutrition. He needs better “food logistics.”

My buddy has probably read more diet books from Barnes & Noble than I have. (I stopped regularly reading from that section of the bookstore years ago as I couldn’t handle the outright lies in so many nutrition books.)

He has a lot of nutrition knowledge. He understands how protein, carbs, fats, and calories work. In other words, he’s got the basics down. Reading another diet book (unless it is MetaShred :)) isn’t going to help him. Lack of nutrition knowledge hasn’t let him down. Consistent execution of his nutrition knowledge, or what I call food logistics, is the gaping hole in his diet arsenal.

As General Robert H. Barrow, Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, said,

“Amateurs talk about tactics, but professionals study logistics.”

This is one of my favorite quotes because it emphasizes what truly matters for long-term diet success:logistics. How do you consistently get the right food to eat at the right times, day in and day out?

The more effort you can put into planning and ensuring that you have the right food available to you at the right times is time well spent. Many nutrition challenges, like eating 30 grams of protein at breakfast, can seem daunting until you sit down and plan how how to make it happen (Click here to see how master protein at breakfast).

Welcome to Episode 6 of the Dr. Mike Show. In this episode we are joined by Men’s Health Food & Nutrition Editor Paul Kita. Paul is THE food person at Men’s Health and has learned from many of the country’s tops food minds. Paul has just released his latest book – A Man, A Pan, A Plan (it is awesome). In today’s show we discuss how Paul got into cooking and working at Men’s Health, his meal planning and preparation rituals and what a minimalist needs to survive in the kitchen.

In This Episode You’ll Learn

The only 4 items you need in the kitchen (strawberry pitter not required).

How to use a Movie Meal to accelerate you meal prep on the weekends.

Exactly how Paul plans and preps his meals (I recommend that you copy is methods ASAP).

Paul’s top tips for awesome cooking.

The only knife you need in the kitchen

The Dr. Mike Show is Brought to You by Neuro Coffee

Neuro Coffee is a high octane brain supplement infused into great coffee.

It contains a patented extract from the coffee fruit, which has been clinically shown to increase levels of brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) after taking. BDNF acts to grow and repair neurons in the brain and the body. As we age, BDNF decreases. Age related diseases of the brain (e.g. age related memory loss) are often associated with low levels of BDNF. Aging in general, stress, and lack of sleep also negatively impact BDNF.

Coffee drinkers never miss their morning cup of coffee, and now with Neuro Coffee you can enjoy that morning ritual even more knowing that it is helping your brain health. Neuro Coffee is roasted in small batches. Click here to start getting your monthly supply of Neuro Coffee. Dr. Mike Show listeners can use the coupon code DRMIKE10 to save 10% on their first order.

]]>http://mikeroussell.com/ep006-minimalist-cooking-for-a-lean-body-meal-planning-in-real-life-and-how-to-spot-great-scrapple-with-special-guest-paul-kita/feed/010234http://mikeroussell.com/ep006-minimalist-cooking-for-a-lean-body-meal-planning-in-real-life-and-how-to-spot-great-scrapple-with-special-guest-paul-kita/3 Keys to a Diet that Will Keep the Weight Off Foreverhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/muscleandcuts/~3/nkFBr89IEco/
http://mikeroussell.com/sustainable-fat-loss-diet-essentials/#respondTue, 07 Nov 2017 14:17:54 +0000Dr. Mikehttp://mikeroussell.com/?p=10221

One of the recurring conversations that I have with clients is about the sustainability of their diets. In other words, how long can they keep up this new way of eating?

I’ve never had a client who hasn’t previously lost weight by changing their diet or lifestyle. Everyone has lost weight in the past. But they’ve regained it. Why? The problem generally has to do with how they lost weight: They couldn’t maintain those changes in their diet and/or lifestyle, and then reverted back to old habits—and previous body weights.

Here’s how the conversation generally goes:

Me: “Have you had success losing weight previously?”

Client: “Yes.”

Me: “What did you do to lose weight?”

Client: “Lots of cardio and I stopped eating carbs.”

Me: “After you lost the weight you wanted, what happened?”

Client: “I hate cardio and love carbs, so I stopped doing cardio and started eating bread again. Obviously, I gained the weight back.”

This is an actual conversation I’ve had with a client, and it’s extremely similar to more than a hundred other conversations I’ve had with people.

This is why I am extremely interested in the sustainability of a diet. Sustainability is one of the most overlooked and most important factors in nutrition. f your diet isn’t sustainable, you will revert back to your old ways, and eventually your old weight.

Generally, you don’t gain weight when your diet stops working—I don’t believe there is such a thing as a diet not working. Instead, weight gain occurs when you abandon those overly restrictive or difficult strategies you used to lose weight in the first place. Then, you embrace previous habits and strategies, leading you to gain weight, and maybe even more than you lost.

The Importance of Discomfort

A mistake that people make when creating a “sustainable” diet is that they use it as an excuse to eat cake. No, sustainable doesn’t mean that you can indulge in whatever you want, just because you’re eating for life

“Sustainable” means you are dialed into a healthy eating plan. The level to which you are committed is determined by what level of “health” you want to achieve. It takes greater commitment to be 8% body fat vs 15% body fat. I think this is a personal preference, but your goals should drive your behaviors.

But here’s a hard truth: Whether you want to be “fitness-model lean” or “fittest-dad-on-the-block lean,” you’re going to have to get a little uncomfortable.

Change is uncomfortable.

Nutritional change is particularly uncomfortable, because unfortunately, the entire world and popular culture is rooting for you to fail. Today’s society is set up to make you eat as many calories as possible and move as little as possible.

In order to make changes to your body—even sustainable ones—you are going to be uncomfortable, and you will need to learn some new tricks.

Three factors separate sustainable diet from an unsustainable diet.

1. How Big of a Change Do You Have to Make?

The more changes you make to current diet and lifestyle, the harder those changes will be to maintain. To make this part a little easier, take the big stuff that requires a lot of change and break it down into smaller steps. When a client challenged me to eat the Big Ugly Burger (a massive one-pound burger) at Bub’s in Indy, . I didn’t eat it in one bite. I took a lot of smaller bites to finish it.

Another example: People are very quick to cut out all carbs from their diet. Eating zero carbs is very difficult to do (I’ve done it) and it doesn’t give you any real advantage. When people talk about cutting out all carbs, they are usually talking about cutting out all grains, starches, and most fruits. This is a big change for people and oftentimes an unnecessary one. In addition to being likely unsustainable due to the level of change from your status quo, I recommend that you adopt theHierarchy of Carbohydrates mode of carb cutting (also featured atMensHealth.com). This allows you to cut out groups of carbohydrates in a fashion that has the biggest bang for its buck while also letting you eat the most satiating carbohydrates the longest.

This allows you to create the change necessary to start getting the weight loss you are looking for while adjusting the level of behavioral discomfort that you are able to handle. This makes it far more sustainable over time.

2. How Much Effort Do You Spend on Food Logistics?

The more time and effort you spend figuring out how to complete a task, the more successful you’ll be in the long term. This sounds obvious,but it is unfortunately not as prevalent in practice.

Here’s an example from my life: getting our kids packed up and out the door for school. With two kids, it was doable to get lunches packed, bags loaded, and the kids on the bus.

But when we added a third child, we needed a plan. Who was getting what snack? Who was buying lunch at school and who were were packing lunch for? What slips need to be signed and put in what backpack? There were too many variables in play to just figure it out on the fly.

Instead, we needed a framework and plan.

The same goes for your diet. If you are adopting a new diet plan, the time that you spend ahead of time figuring out how to execute the diet in your life day after day is the best time that you can spend. I call this “food logistics.” Successful weight loss consists of a solid diet plan and good food logistics:

The diet plan dictates what foods you are going to eat.

Food logistics dictate how those foods will get in front of you when you need to eat.

People spent too little time and effort on food logistics, instead leaving their food decisions up until the moment that they are supposed to eat. The more time and effort you invest in planning and figuring out how your dietary approach will work into your life, the more successful you will be, and the more sustainable the diet will be.

What places can you order delivery from and what meals can you order that fit into your nutrition plan?

If you are answering these questions easily and creating plans for the execution of your diet then your food logistics plan is strong and your diet will be sustainable.

3.How Committed Are You?

The third key to a sustainable diet is your commitment to stay the course. The foods we eat are deeply ingrained in our life. This is why it’s important to realize that when we change our eating habits it will change parts of our life—for both good and bad.

If you want to change your body and health for good, you have to create some new social habits. You also have to abandon those that do not contribute to your new goals and strong, fit, and healthy life. If you’re committed, you’ll have to pick up some new ways of spending time with family and friends. You’ll have to spend some time to develop a culture around you that is supportive of your lifestyle. For example:

Just like stress, change can be beneficial or difficult: It just depends on your perspective. How we view stressors in our life determines how l they impact us and our body. How we view change in our life determines if it empowers us or discourages us.

Embrace the changes that come with a new diet and use them to further your commitment to your new lifestyle—instead of fostering resentment toward them. This helps those changes become more sustainable. You are choosing to order the salad with flank steak because it will take you closer towards your goals. Order it cheerfully and don’t mope that you aren’t ordering the chicken wings.

The decision is yours.

You got this.

How Will You Move Forward?

It is important to always think about the sustainability of your diet and your habits. Even if you are engaged in an immersive and intensive fat loss program like the MetaShred diet you need to ask yourself (as I do in the book): What will you do now?

What will you do once you lose the weight?

How will you proceed that next morning?

Are you currently setting yourself up for success beyond your weight loss goals?

Embed the 3 successful characteristics of a sustainable fat loss diet into your life now to ensure that you never have to re-lose any weight again.

Everyone wants the mental edge. People of all ages want to avoid dementia, improve their memory, and maintain a sharp mind for life. And while researchers are asking more questions about how to deal with diseases of the brain, consumers are looking for a solution themselves.

Since 2000, search results for Alzheimer’s disease in the scientific database PubMed have climbed from 3,200 papers to more than 8,000. Meanwhile, the memory supplement and nutraceutical market has grown 100% for the past several years.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of misinformation about brain health. The biggest misconception is that there is a magic bullet drug or supplement like the drug NZT that Bradley Cooper took in the movie Limitless.

There isn’t.

Your brain is a complex organ and thus requires a more all-encompassing approach. This is why I have put together for you the ultimate lifestyle approach to improving your memory. This guide outlines 5 specific areas – exercise, sleep, stress management, nutrition, and supplementation. We’ll look at the importance of each area and how you can optimize it with your brain and memory in mind.

The Ultimate Lifestyle Approach to Improving Your Memory

There is no magic bullet to improve your memory and cognitive health. Brain research suggests that the most effective approach is a lifestyle approach that encompasses exercise, sleep, stress management, nutrition, and supplementation.

One thing to note is that while we are focusing on exercise’s ability to improve memory, exercise has a variety of beneficial effects on the brain, including increasing BDNF (aka ‘Miracle-Gro’ for your brain cells) and boosting endorphins, the feel-good compounds that are released by your body when you exercise.

When it comes to your memory, metal health, and brain function, the answer with exercise is clear – do different kinds of exercise as often as you can.

Chapter 2: Prune Your Memory While You Sleep to Remember Important Items While Discarding Useless Information

When you think about improving your memory, sleep probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. But getting 7-9 hours of sleep each night is essential for a properly functioning memory and brain.

Inadequate sleep (<7 hours a night) is a massive problem for Americans. It is estimated that up to 80% of people suffer from transient insomnia while 15% are plagued by chronic insomnia. This lack of sleep can direct impact your ability to remember people’s names, hold and use multiple ideas in your mind at once, and remember basic facts.

Getting sufficient sleep is important for memory and information retention, especially as we get older. According to Dr. Matthew Walker from UC Berkeley, “When we are young, we have deep sleep that helps the brain store and retain new facts and information. But as we get older, the quality of our sleep deteriorates and prevents those memories from being saved by the brain at night.”

As we age, our bodies naturally get less REM/deep sleep on a percentage-basis of our total sleep. This makes it more and more important that you get sufficient (or even more) sleep as you get older. By increasing the total amount of sleep we get, we will be able to increase the total amount of REM/deep sleep we also get.

Another reason why sleep is so important for your memory is that it allows your brain to get rid of all the extraneous information it picked up during the day that is of no consequence to you. One study found that animals’ brains were 18% smaller upon waking compared to when they went to sleep due to this memory pruning and optimizing. This strategic forgetting may be an important step for optimizing overall brain health and function.

How can you get started with quality sleep? For many people, getting to bed earlier is the best first step. If you want to get 8 hours of sleep and need to be up by 7am, the only way this can happen is if you are in bed and asleep by 11pm

But as the insomnia statistics show, getting to bed might not be enough. Many people have trouble falling asleep once they are in bed. It is important to remember that falling asleep is a passive process and isn’t something that you can make yourself do. We’ve all had those situations when we are tossing and turning in bed, unable to fall sleep, and trying harder to sleep just makes it worse.

Chapter 3: 6 Ways to Zap Stress in Order to Take the Chains Off Your Memory and Information Recall

Memory, your mind, and stress have a funny relationship. Short-term (or acute) stress can lead to an increase in focus and attention, but long-term stress eats away at your memory. Here’s an example to illustration this dichotomy.

If you were getting chased by a bear, your flight or flight response would kick into overdrive. The immediate dump of stress hormones and adrenaline into your bloodstream that results from your fight or flight response would cause you to have laser focus (to aid in survival). This is a situation where stress leads to improvements in mental function.

Traumatic (uber high stress) experiences also have significant impact on your memory. In the case of the bear, that memory would deeply implant in your mind. And when traumatic experiences go too far, they can cause temporary memory loss. This memory loss could be in part due to the stress hormone cortisol, which inhibits memory recall.

Outside of these extreme and short-term stressful situations, stress is very bad for your memory. Most of the stress that you experience in your life is chronic stress. Chronic stress is lower-level stress that is sustained for long periods of time. This kind of stress can actually damage the structure of your brain and how the neurons in your brain connect.

I’m sorry if these first paragraphs stressed you out! That was not the goal.

I simply want to emphasize the profound impact that ongoing stress has on our brain and memory. If you want to improve your memory and brain function, then a major step in the right direction is taking stress management seriously.

The good news is that controlling memory-blunting stress in your life is much easier than you might think. Below I’ve outlined for you what I think are the 6 best ways to help control stress both immediately and over the long term so that you can take the stress brakes off your memory and allow your brain to function at its full potential.

Chapter 4: How to Use Nutrition to Clear the Metabolic Smoke That’s Impeding Your Memory

When it comes to improving memory and enhancing brain function, it’s hard to say whether nutrition, sleep, deliberate stress reduction, or exercise is the most important. However, nutrition may be the most important.

One of the reasons that nutrition could be considered the most important area of focus with respects to memory and brain health is because when you properly fuel your body, you are giving your brain the ability to function at its best.

Proper nutrition helps counteract the metabolic stresses of daily life that, if left unchecked, can lead to decreased cognitive function. What I’m talking about is oxidative stress. Oxidation at the most basic level is a chemical reaction that combines oxygen with another compound or molecule. This process results in the production of free radicals. If these accumulate unchecked, it leads to increased oxidative stress (i.e. stress put on your biology due to excessive oxidation), which can accelerate brain aging and memory impairment.

But since oxygen is the life blood of the human body — we are constantly using oxygen in chemical reactions and producing free radicals — stopping oxidation isn’t an option. This is where antioxidants come in. Antioxidants are compounds that quench, or neutralize, the free radicals produced by oxidative reactions. And we need to eat foods in our diet that are rich with antioxidants to help support this process in our bodies.

Let me share with your one of my favorite analogies to give you another way of looking at it. Imagine your brain is a room. As we live our lives and get older, the room starts to fill with smoke. The more smoke in the room, the harder it is to do things (i.e. think, remember stuff, etc). In order to improve our brain function and memory, we need to clear the smoke. Antioxidants are the things that allow us to clear the smoke from the room (our brains), allowing us to think more clearly.

Make sense?

So what are these foods that contain the antioxidants that our body needs?

I’m not a big believer in memory-boosting foods, as there are no foods that you can eat that will lead to immediate improvements in brain function. (Harvard Health agrees with me.) There is also no magic bullet food that you can eat.

Instead research shows that there are collections or groups of foods (what nutrition researchers call dietary patterns) that, when eaten consistently, can help reduce your risk of diseases like Alzheimer’s. One group of researchers from Columbia University Medical School found the following foods to be key to reducing risk of Alzheimer’s disease: nuts, fish, tomatoes, poultry, cruciferous vegetables, fruits, and dark and green leafy vegetables.

Another diet that has gotten a lot of attention for its beneficial effects on your brain is the MIND diet. MIND is an acronym (us scientists LOVE acronyms!) for Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay diet. The MIND diet was developed as a collaborative effort between Rush University, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Brigham & Women’s Hospital, and the National Institute on Aging. It is a modification of the DASH diet (another acronym-based diet – Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension), which was developed back in 1993 by scientists at Johns Hopkins University.

Here’s the awesome news about the MIND Diet: In 3 years it reduced risk of Alzheimer’s Disease by 53% in people who vigilantly followed the diet. And people who had moderate adherence to the MIND Diet still experienced a 35% reduction in risk of Alzheimer’s disease!!

The MIND diet contains 10 brain-friendly food groups:

Green leafy vegetables – 1 salad daily

Other vegetables – 1 serving daily (e.g. 1 cup raw broccoli)

Nuts – 1 serving daily (e.g. 49 pistachios)

Berries – 2 or more (1/2 cup) servings per week (blueberries and strawberries are emphasized)

The MIND Diet also promotes the avoidance of the following 5 foods and food groups:

Red meat – Eat rarely (I disagree with this recommendation and believe data shows that lean red meats can be consumed just as you would consume poultry. However, it is prudent to minimize processed meats.)

Butter – 1 Tbsp or less per day (always butter, never margarine)

Cheese – 1 serving per week (1 serving = 1.5 oz)

Pastries and Sweets – Avoid all (buzzkill! 1 per month is fine, in my opinion)

The area of supplements for brain health used to be the Wild West. Today it is slowly moving away from that due to some serious action by the FTC and the attorney generals of various states. This increased regulatory action could be due to the fact that companies have essentially been lying to consumers about the research behind their products and the product effectiveness. But the worst part, and something that has been noted by the FTC, is that many companies are preying on people who are scared about cognitive diseases and giving them false hope.

However, not all products are like this and some contain ingredients that are backed by human clinical trials to support the claims on the bottles and packaging. Still, there are some eternal truths about supplements that are important to keep in mind. Supplements are valuable to you when they provide you with a nutrient in an amount that you could not otherwise get in your normal daily life and with normal food consumption. Here are some examples of worthwhile supplements for your brain health and memory.

Spearmint Extract

Spearmint contains more than 50 different types of antioxidants and has been shown through a variety of studies to support neuronal growth and maintenance while also aiding in the production of key neurotransmitters. Now, it is impossible to eat 50 pounds of spearmint leaves per day to reap these benefits, so that is why a spearmint extract supplement is valuable for supporting cognitive health. Spearmint extract can help improve attention, concentration, and working memory.

DHA

Many people do not eat oily fish on a regular basis due to taste preference, availability, or price. This is why a DHA supplement is a valuable insurance policy for your brain as you get older.

L-theanine

L-theaine is a unique amino acid found in tea leaves that has the ability to enhance mental relaxation without inducing drowsiness. However, 1 cup of black tea only contains 20mg of L-theanine, and a majority of research studies show that you need 200mg to elicit a consistent effect (although 50mg can work in some cases). Most people aren’t willing to drink 10 cups of tea in one sitting, so a supplement is warranted.

Curcumin

Curcumin is an extract from turmeric that has a variety of functions in the body. It is a powerful anti-inflammatory compound that acts on one of the same enzymes in the body as ibuprofen (the COX-2 enzyme, for those into the biochemistry of life). Research has unearthed derivatives of curcumin that may in the future play a role in the fight against Alzheimer’s disease. Only through supplementation (and not seasoning meals with turmeric) would we be able to get enough of the specific derivative of curcumin needed to wage a war against Alzheimer’s disease at a cellular level. It is important to note that the Alzheimer’s/curcumin derivative connection is in its infancy and I only mention it here as an example of when supplements vs. eating whole foods is warranted.

Chapter 6: Why Brain Games Won’t Keep Your Mind Sharp and What to Do Instead

Over the last several years, there has been an explosion of brain games touting the power to help keep your mind sharp while fighting off age-related memory loss with daily practice and use. Unfortunately the science (or lack thereof) did not match these claims, causing the FTC fine andreprimand several of the big players in this industry for false advertising. Seventy psychologists and neuroscientists have also taken a stand against the claims of brain games to improve long-term cognitive health and memory stating:

We object to the claim that brain games offer consumers a scientifically grounded avenue to reduce or reverse cognitive decline when there is no compelling scientific evidence to date that they do. The promise of a magic bullet detracts from the best evidence to date, which is that cognitive health in old age reflects the long-term effects of healthy, engaged lifestyles. In the judgment of the signatories, exaggerated and misleading claims exploit the anxiety of older adults about impending cognitive decline. We encourage continued careful research and validation in this field.

The good news is that these leading scientists agree with the premise of this Ultimate Lifestyle Guide for Improving Your Memory and Cognitive Health in that optimizing your brain function and memory cannot be achieved through a magic bullet but instead through a long-term engagement in a healthy life. As the researchers point out in their letter:

Before investing time and money on brain games, consider what economists call opportunity costs: If an hour spent doing solo software drills is an hour not spent hiking, learning Italian, making a new recipe, or playing with your grandchildren, it may not be worth it. But if it replaces time spent in a sedentary state, like watching television, the choice may make more sense for you.

Links and Resources: Reading, Socializing, and Other Strategies to Improve Brain Function